Beyond Peterloo: Elijah Dixon and Manchester's Forgotten Reformers

Summary

ELIJAH DIXON played a key role in the Blanketeer's March of 1817. Arrested, chained in double irons and imprisoned without trial, the episode set the stage for the Peterloo Massacre.

Everybody in Victorian Manchester knew of Elijah Dixon. Over a period of sixty years, he was an ever-present force in the tumultuous politics of the town. He worked alongside the great figures of nineteenth century Radicalism, and as 'The Manchester Man' he became the town’s ambassador for Chartism. An early apostle of votes for women, Temperance advocate, Christian convert, Dixon rose from poverty to make a fortune as Britain’s first mass-producer of matches.

In Beyond Peterloo, Robert Hargreaves and Alan Hampson bring Elijah’s previously overlooked yet vital contribution to social reform to life. Set against the backdrop of the Blanketeer’s March of 1817 and the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, they reveal the fascinating story of his life and work as Manchester’s forgotten reformer.

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Beyond Peterloo - Rob Hargreaves

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Introduction

The long life of Elijah Dixon, beginning on 23 October 1790, coincided with a period during which Britain underwent the most profound change it has ever experienced before or since. The change was heralded by revolutions in technology, social mobility and politics, overwhelming the staid structures of society that had held sway for centuries.

Scientific advances, begun in the eighteenth century, culminated in an entirely new phenomenon; huge towns and cities situated not around castle, manor house, abbey or market cross, but in the shadow of industry. And nowhere were these changes so dramatically manifested than in Manchester, as it expanded from a small satellite township bordering Salford to a sprawling city-sized conglomerate in less than fifty years.

With mass migration into these workshop towns, came the realisation that aristocratic governance and parochial administration were inadequate. As transport and communications improved, especially following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, hitherto mainly servile workers developed a sense of awareness that they were not sharing in the new wealth created from the sweat of their brows. Rather, this new class of industrial worker was being treated no better, and often worse, than hereditary landowners had treated their peasantry.

These imbalances and injustices provoked a wave of discontent and a new political dimension, inspired by writers of the ‘Enlightenment’, and encouraged by revolutionary events in France and the American colonies. Ordinary people began to question the age-old hierarchy, and demanded human rights long denied them.

So it came about that shortly after two o’clock on 16 August 1819, under a cloudless Manchester sky, troopers of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, their work done, dismounted, in order to ease their horses’ girths, to adjust their accoutrements, and to wipe the blood from their sabres.

The meeting on St Peter’s Field was organised by the Manchester Patriotic Union Society, in which Elijah Dixon was a leading light. Then an Ancoats shopkeeper, it was not the first time, nor the would it be the last, that he and his Radical comrades faced military might as a means of suppressing their demands for reform. Another of that disparate, awkward, and irascible brotherhood of Manchester malcontents was Dixon’s friend and neighbour, James Wroe, an impoverished journalist and bookseller, who, in a parody of complacent post-war patriotism, coined a word to encapsulate the nation’s guilt; Peterloo.

England shuddered with shame. It was a seminal moment in the nation’s history.

As well as Wroe, Dixon lived, worked alongside, and befriended many of Manchester’s foremost Radicals, including James Scholefield, Edward Nightingale, Reginald Richardson, John Knight, Abel Heywood and William Willis. More moderate reformers, such as Archibald Prentice, did not always see eye to eye with Elijah and his friends. Radical weaver Samuel Bamford scathingly referred to them as ‘the contemptible Elijah Dixon set’. At the height of the Reform Act crisis in 1832, a prominent Whig supporter described Elijah and fellow members of a Radical deputation as ‘ill-looking conceited fellows’. So too, there were fierce disagreements between Elijah and Richard Cobden, notably over the activities of the Anti-Corn Law League, but their relationship matured into mutual respect.

Ever-present in the tumults of Manchester politics for more than sixty years, Elijah spoke at meetings alongside William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, Feargus O’Connor, and Ernest Jones. A practical politician, Elijah stood alongside Tory reformer Richard Oastler to secure reform of child labour and factory conditions. Not always the most prominent or flamboyant speaker, Elijah characterised his own contribution as ‘shoulder work’. Later in life, he befriended reforming Liberal campaigners, such as Jacob Bright and Richard Pankhurst, whose awareness that working people lacked proper representation portended the formation of the Labour Party.

Elijah did not belong by birth to the landless masses who huddled together round the mean streets of Ancoats, seeking work. Like Cobden, he hailed from yeoman stock fallen on hard times. Yet, growing up in deprived and polluted Manchester, he was able to witness, and to contribute to, hard-won improvements in working conditions and education, and eventually a gradual growth in prosperity. From Co-operation and free education, to building societies and utopian land schemes, he pushed for political reform and explored every means of betterment for industrial workers. He was a member of Manchester’s first Hampden Club, dedicated to voting reform, along with John Knight and lifelong friend David Ridgway. As an organiser of the ill-fated Blanketeers march of 1817, he was arrested, transported to London in chains and imprisoned for eight months without trial or charge.

Elijah lived to see immense technological change – steam-powered factories, mechanised textile processes, the building of canals, macadamised roads, the coming of the railway age, the birth of photography, pharmaceutical chemistry, coal-gas for lighting and heating, electricity, and the introduction of the telegraph. At the Great Exhibition of 1851, these and many other wonders of the age showed off Victorian Britain as the workshop of the world. Among the proud exhibitors was the firm of Dixon, Son & Company, market leaders in match manufacturing. An idealist, yes, but Elijah Dixon the entrepreneur progressed by a combination of shrewdness and hard work from mill hand to mass-production. Along the way, he tried his hand at milk-selling, as a co-operative baker, and making and selling sundries for the growing druggist market. Match-making and an off-shoot timber business made him a fortune.

But success did not dilute his commitment to reform and social justice. To Elijah Dixon wealth was an opportunity to do good – to put Christian beliefs into action – enabling him to progress long-cherished schemes such as land reclamation at Chat Moss, the setting up of mechanics’ institutes, and the development of a model suburb at New Moston. He remained a campaigner for the rights of ordinary men and women to the end of his life.

For a short time after his death in 1876, Elijah Dixon was remembered as a Peterloo veteran and ‘Father of English reformers’. Yet within a generation or so he and most of his Radical comrades had been forgotten, even by the people of Manchester. In August 2019, democracies all over the world will commemorate the bi-centenary of events on St Peter’s Field. It would also be fitting, especially for Mancunians, to reflect on the shoulder work for freedom put in by Elijah Dixon.

Chapter One

Holmfirth

What beauteous visions filled this spot!

What dreams of pleasure long forgot!

Nor hope, nor joy, nor love, nor fear

Have left one trace of record here.

Anonymous (c.1820), Lines to a Skeleton

She left the room without a word, and did not return. Her husband, alerted to the sound of his children crying, began searching, only to find her lifeless – strangled by her own silk handkerchief, in the dye-house. Such, according to family legend, was the violent death of genteel Betty Dixon, aged 32, on the 2 September 1798.¹

Job Dixon, four years her senior, was left to pick up the pieces of a life – a dynasty – in ruins. It was said that a Dixon had formed and led a cavalry troop for Parliament in the Civil War. Down the centuries, the family prospered as clothiers, putting out yarn to cottage weavers in the royds and hamlets of the Yorkshire Pennines, taking in and selling the finished cloth. These clothiers were, before the coming of factories, kingpins of the domestic system, enjoying superior social status. Betty herself, said to be a celebrated Yorkshire beauty, and by all accounts an imperious woman, came from a well-off family of clothiers, in nearby Almondbury. Even so, when she married Job at All Hallows church, Kirkburton, in 1787, she was unable to sign her name, having to resort to the usual formality of making her mark by way of a cross.

Of the seven children Betty (nee Tattersall) bore to Job over ten years, five survived at the time of her death. The eldest of these was Elijah, not yet eight when his mother died, born on 23 October 1790 at Hey End in Wooldale, Holmfirth, and baptised on 7 November at Holy Trinity church, a chapel of ease within Kirkburton parish. It might be supposed, and perhaps inferred from later events, that even as a young boy Elijah Dixon felt the call of duty. Business failing, his father Job now faced the supreme crisis of his life. As the eldest son, Elijah was bound to help care for his younger brothers – Isaiah (6), twins Abner and Hezekiah (3), and Asa (16 months). Elijah’s elder brother Nehemiah, Betty’s first-born, had died aged four. Asa’s twin, Oded, had died on 29 June 1798, aged fourteen months.

Two factors ensured the end of the clothiers’ golden age and the downfall of Job Dixon. First was the development of factories powered by water and steam that could out-produce small-scale cottage weavers, and second was war with France and Napoleon, which destroyed ancient trading patterns in Europe. Bitter poverty, universally euphemised as distress, became widespread amongst weaving communities, although some held out longer than others. The weavers and clothiers of Holmfirth, and indeed most of west Yorkshire, were especially hard hit. The mutual blockades of the French and English Navies cut them off from established markets, particularly in France and the Low Countries. Job Dixon was an early victim. His trade with Antwerp collapsed when Napoleon invaded that city in 1794, and the prosperity the Dixons had enjoyed never recovered.

Job’s ruin was abetted by a duplicitous agent along the chain of bills of exchange which stretched to Antwerp via London. It is said that ruin comes slowly at first, then quickly. Perhaps, after this disaster, Job was able to stay in business by relying on the family name, help from friends, borrowing, and selling off assets. He struggled on for another seven years, under the threat of peremptory enforcement by creditors, hoping to get their money when trade picked up. Indeed, when the end came, the ultimate humiliations of insolvency – bankruptcy and debtor’s prison – were avoided. Instead, Job’s creditors permitted him to use the relatively benign legal device of assignment, eschewing bankruptcy proceedings in the hope of recovering losses from his debtors.

A year earlier, at the time of the birth of Oded and Asa, the Dixons appear to have been hanging on to Hey End, their hill-side family home with its handy cellar space for warehousing, and its impressive views south across the valley to Black Hill and Holme Moss. At least, Job’s address is so recorded in the baptismal register for the twins at Holy Trinity church. The christening was the last event at which the family was able to keep up appearances, the last occasion shared by the family before tragedy and upheaval changed everything. Perhaps contemplating the moorland grandeur all around him, or playing with friends, six-year-old Elijah had resented the abrupt summons from his mother to be scrubbed and suited, along with younger brother Isaiah and toddler twins Abner and Hezekiah. As Betty gathered the fortnight-old twins into her shawl, and Job led the raggle-taggle procession down the steep twisting lane to the town, Elijah may have picked up enough from their worried looks and hushed conversation to realise that all was not well; that an occasion for thankful celebration was overshadowed by uncertainty and fear of the future. Only eight days later, on 12 May 1797, Job’s mother, Mary, died aged 77.

Soon afterwards, Hey End was vacated and the family literally and visibly went down in the world – down the hillside a quarter of a mile to Hey Gap, a terrace of dwellings behind the church, just high enough to catch smoke rising from the fires of houses and shops at river level in the centre of the town. It is easy to imagine Betty’s deteriorating state of mind during the summer of 1798, as, on top of the loss of her son, her husband faced bankruptcy.

Betty was laid to rest in the churchyard at Holmfirth, where Oded had been buried barely nine weeks before. Her burial there seems to establish that whatever the true circumstances of her death, there was no formal finding of suicide. Had there been, she could have been denied interment in consecrated ground. But in the light of Elijah’s account of his mother’s death, fifty years later, it is hard to resist the conclusion that Betty’s suicide was covered up.

Job stayed on at Hey Gap for two more years, hoping his fortunes might recover, and while there, as a widower with five young sons, he evidently sought solace in the company of a neighbour, Mary Chatterton. Almost twenty years Job’s junior, Mary may initially have merely helped with the children, but then came another child, John Chatterton, born out of wedlock in September 1800. Job and Mary married at All Hallows church on 10 May 1801. Mary could hardly have married for money. Soon there followed the ignominy of a meeting of Job’s creditors at the Fleece Hotel, Huddersfield, preceded by publication on 20 July of a legal notice in the Leeds Intelligencer.

On the 24 August 1801, a notice of assignment appeared in the same journal, optimistically inviting Job’s debtors to pay up on pain of legal action. Naturally, these brief legal notices in the press gave no clue as to the family tragedy which had preceded them. Job’s assignees, Titus Tate and James Hollingsworth, respectively in business as wool-stapler and clothier, are likely to have been known to him and Betty, latterly as creditors, but once as socialising members of a clothier elite. Though an assignment was not the same as bankruptcy, it marked the end of Job’s business and was undoubtedly terminal to social aspiration and status around the Holme Valley. The celebrated beauty had been spared what she could not face.

A year later, the relieved burghers of Holmfirth would rush to commemorate the temporary cessation of hostilities with France by building ‘Owd Genn’, a fifteen-foot memorial stone, on the banks of the River Holme. But the Peace of Amiens was a false dawn. Not until after Bonaparte was finally beaten at Waterloo were the clothiers able to trade with Europe again. And by then it was too late for the Dixons.

It is unlikely that Job was destitute, but he must have been desperate to leave Holmfirth to make a new life for himself, Mary and the children. Inevitably he would look to business contacts made on both sides of the Pennines. If he had been among the Yorkshire clothiers who regularly attended the September textile fair in Salford, he could have made contacts in the Manchester area. Even the legal process of Job’s assignment straddled the Pennines; joint trustee, and fellow clothier, James Hollingworth, was based in Micklehurst, at the north east extremity of Cheshire, a few miles from Oldham. Crucially, any opportunity on the other side of the great moorland divide would mean a fresh start, leaving behind the shame of business failure and the tragedy of Betty’s death.

In any event, the Dixons crossed the Pennines in the autumn of 1801, either together, or with Mary and the children following on after Job had secured accommodation. However they travelled – on foot, by horse-drawn cart or coach – the shortest route was over the moorland road to Oldham, via the hamlet of Greenfield. It is hard to resist the thought that, as our little party of refugees neared the pennine divide at Wessenden Head below the sombre sheep pastures of Black Hill, they may have glanced back ruefully down the valley towards Holmfirth and the world they were leaving forever.

Descending the hills into Lancashire, the children, who had probably never ventured so far from home, would not at first have seen anything very different from the familiar moorland landscape behind them. Until they reached Springhead, a cockstride from Oldham, they were still in the West Riding of the County of York and the stone-built cottages along the road, with multiple mullioned windows on their upper floors, differed little from the handloom weavers’ cottages to the east of the watershed.

Just beyond the summit, however, they may, had the weather been fine, have glimpsed a distant and hazy view of the Welsh mountains across the Cheshire plain. At Greenfield, the Dixons would cross the line of the new canal being built to link Manchester and Huddersfield, and then, nearing Oldham, catch glimpses of a different world – the world of the factory, and of spinning mules powered by water or steam, springing up in the towns of Lancashire and Cheshire, and Manchester itself. Elijah and his brothers would see mill chimneys smoking from coal-fired boilers, collieries in Oldham and Werneth, and, as the road descended towards the great town before them, more and more new cottages, built not of stone, but of brick. They might have shared the turnpike with carters taking coal to the new canal basin at Hollinwood, or on into the mills of Manchester and beyond. Although the manufacturers of Lancashire were also feeling the effects of the war against the French, Elijah would see that the Dixons were arriving in a world of bigger horizons, darker skies, and a pace of life that reflected the fact that they had come to the fastest growing town in the kingdom.

Chapter Two

New Cross

Why from the Cart, ye busy elves,

For others’ ‘mendment waste your breath?

Let me advise - Reform yourselves,

Lest from a Cart you get your death.

Verse in The Manchester Mercury, 18 March 1817

In Manchester, Job obtained whatever work he could find in the cotton mills, first as a fustian-cutter, and later as a dyer and labourer. He settled his family in Ancoats at the industrial heart of the town. Nearby was the new Murray Mill, credited with being the first great cotton mill, standing alongside the line of new Rochdale Canal, still under construction.

The mills were hungry for cheap child labour, and Elijah and his older brothers were like as not put to work as soon as Job could find places for them. Long hours and exposure to dirt and dangerous machinery was their lot. Within a few months, Isaiah Dixon died, aged eight. He was the third brother lost to Elijah. Although he never spoke of the cause of death – it might easily have been an accident – Elijah was deeply affected. In the mean streets, overcrowded slums, and mills of New Cross and Ancoats the Dixon brothers were exposed to all the horrors of the industrial revolution, all the brutalities of the unregulated factory system.

Isaiah’s burial in December 1801, at the Collegiate church of St Mary, St Denys and St George (later to become Manchester Cathedral), marked the sombre beginning of a new chapter in the lives of Job and Mary and the children. Holmfirth was behind them, but a tenuous link remained; a stately saraband of proceedings in the court of Chancery, by which Job hoped to establish his right to the considerable estate of an ancestor who had died intestate. It was a ray of hope.

There was work, but what else? It is impossible to read of the later achievements of Elijah without believing that somehow or other, in spite of poverty and long hours of work, his education continued. In Holmfirth, despite the shadow of ruin which hung over them, Job had probably done his best to educate his children or to arrange some kind of schooling. Likewise, once in Manchester, Job himself may have continued his children’s education. Whatever the circumstances, Elijah acquired the habit of reading widely.

Manchester was expanding at a phenomenal rate as the revolution in textile manufacture generated the building of steam-powered cotton mills. Vast sums of money were being invested and from all over the British Isles, refugees from rural poverty streamed into the city looking for work and livelihood. The wars with France continued, but while they may have slowed the growth of Manchester they did not stop it. Indeed, some there were who did very well out of the wars – manufacturers of uniforms, bandages and patches for muskets, for example.

Close to the Dixons’ home, the Rochdale Canal opened on 20 December 1804. The event was marked by two boat loads of dignitaries being towed into town, to the accompaniment of the band of the 1st Battalion of the Manchester and Salford Volunteers. A fully-laden boat – which next day arrived in Liverpool via the Bridgewater canal and the navigable rivers Irwell and Mersey – followed in the wake of the VIPs. It would have been quite a spectacle for the Dixon children if they were able to see it. In times gone by, when Job was a prosperous clothier, they might have expected to see their father in the official party of celebrants, or even to have accompanied him. Now, as child labourers, they would be kept well away from official proceedings, fortunate even to glimpse the pomp and ceremony so removed from the grind of their everyday lives. For the Dixon boys, smoky Manchester was a far cry from the rural wilds of Yorkshire and the moorland air of childhood. The privileges they had once enjoyed belonged to a lost world.

It is therefore easy to understand how an educated boy from a poor home might have viewed the tumults of his adopted town; poverty, and the injustice to men and women denied remedy for their ills. Of these, Elijah Dixon had a worm’s eye view. In later life, he told how he started in the mill as a ‘scavenger’, work well-suited to the small frame of a child, able to crawl under machinery to retrieve waste. Later he became a ‘piecer’, where a child’s thin and nimble fingers were suitable for the vital work of rejoining cotton threads broken in the spinning process. Both jobs carried the risk of injury from moving machinery. Conditions endured by children in mills and factories were to become notorious, and in the early years of the nineteenth century they were dangerous, unhealthy and completely unregulated. Much depended on the attitude of the individual mill owner, or the ‘overlooker’, who was supposed to ensure that before anyone went under, the machine was stopped. But overlookers, too, were under pressure, and there was always the temptation to risk minor adjustments being made while machinery was still in motion. Long hours, lack of ventilation, and frequent accidents were often concealed, falsified, or justified, by owners, to whom exploitation was as unremarkable and inoffensive as the slavery which produced raw cotton for their mills. For many employers, labour was simply a factor of production, human capital.

At the age of 13 or 14, around 1804, Elijah obtained an apprenticeship as a spinner. Later, he referred to his employer as a ‘pious Methodist’, and to this being one of the happiest periods of his life. Where the Dixons first resided is not known, but in 1811 they were at 1, Back Gun Street and four years later at 16, Great Ancoats Street. By 1817, Elijah was working as a spinner at the mill of Thomas Houldsworth, known for his Tory sympathies, in Newton Street, Ancoats. Later events suggest that he earned the respect of his employer, which was probably reciprocated. Whatever the conditions at Houldsworth mill, in Ancoats and New Cross, poverty, disease, infant mortality and injustice were everyday facts of life. It is fair to surmise that during these years, Elijah became politicised. Nowhere in England were the writings of William Cobbett read more keenly than in Manchester. Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man would also have circulated among the growing body of Radical reformers to which Elijah was attracted, as well as a proliferation of pamphlets designed to circumvent the government tax on newspapers.

Indeed, there was injustice, inequality and want across the land. The Tory government of William Pitt, fearful of revolution spreading from France, went on the attack with a series of measures designed to stop working people organising to achieve better wages and conditions. In 1795 the government had issued a series of proclamations respecting seditious meetings, followed by the Seditious Assemblies Act, and the Treasonable and Seditious Practices Act. Other measures enacted by Parliament after 1799, and which became known as the Combination Laws, struck at the principle of trade unions, leaving workers little choice but to organise in secret. The price of wheat, which before the war had been 6s (six shillings) a bushel, rose to 16s 8d. There were bread riots. At the same time, Lancashire gentry and mill owners, encouraged by Lord Derby, as Lord Lieutenant of the county, contributed to a public subscription to raise funds and troops for the war. Workers and anti-war Radicals alike had their noses rubbed in it.

The government’s policy was driven by fear of contagion from France. Writers and politicians influenced by the Enlightenment, aided by articulate and prolific pamphleteers, had supported rebellion in the American colonies, and so had the French. Most Tories and many Whigs, as well as the new men of property produced by the industrial revolution, viewed sympathy with the French, opposition to the war and dissent from the Anglican church as challenges to the established social order at home. Likewise, any form of agitation for the relief of poverty and distress, or for political enfranchisement, was seen as potentially revolutionary and treasonable. In Manchester, from the outbreak of war in 1793, this reactionary view was fervently encouraged, and men who had most to lose from continuation of the wars with France, were subject to a campaign of propaganda and persecution from the ‘Church-and-King’ party. Not really a party as such, this was a nickname for a reactionary, pro-monarchy, pro-Anglican faction, crossing both mainstream political parties, active from the beginning of the Napoleonic wars onwards. However, as a boy growing to maturity, Elijah would have become aware that on occasions these reactionaries suffered reverses. In particular, in what the government had intended to be a show trial, a jury at Lancaster assizes acquitted seven Manchester men on an indictment to overthrow the constitution.

But the Church-and-King party remained active. Organised mobs attacked Radical bookshops and public houses frequented by those opposed to the war and who favoured reform. As the wars dragged on, the employment of spies to obtain dubious evidence against agitators became systematic. The authorities flexed their muscles at every opportunity.

Events in 1808 and 1812 gave them victories of a sort. A meeting of weavers was held on 24 May 1808, in St George’s Fields, Manchester, to demonstrate in favour of a Bill to fix a minimum rate of wages. When the meeting resumed the following day, magistrates read the Riot Act, although by all accounts, there was no disorder. The 4th Dragoon Guards were ordered to clear the ground, and in the melee a weaver was killed, and others injured. The episode led to a six-months prison sentence for the maverick Colonel Hanson of Strangeways Hall, self-styled ‘friend of the weavers’, who attended the event on horseback, alongside his groom, and was prosecuted for encouraging disorder.

The shadowy figure of Joseph Nadin, Deputy Constable, and his fellow constables were widely believed to have supported the prosecution of the colonel with trumped up evidence. Nadin relished his power. He became the unofficial ruler of Manchester – his authority derived from the medieval system of local government still surviving in nearly all industrial towns. Undemocratic, and self-perpetuating, the system provided Manchester with a force of four beadles for daytime duty and only forty-eight constables for the night watch. Theoretically these constables were accountable to the Boroughreeve and the Court Leet, but paradoxically, the Deputy Constable was the real working chief. Nadin, a former spinner, unlike later holders of the office who received training with London’s Bow Street Runners, had no formal training whatever. What recommended him to his employers was his ruthlessness. He was over six feet tall, and a surviving portrait suggests a thick-set, fearsome-looking man.

Although the usual practice was to appoint Deputy Constables annually, Nadin had held the office continuously since October 1802. He must have given good satisfaction to his Church-and-King paymasters. He exercised his power in their interests and his own. He bullied publicans into barring Radicals from their premises, took bribes from brothel keepers, and sold off ‘Tyburn tickets’ (official exemptions from civic duties) for his own profit. His corruption brought him wealth, and he even made loans to magistrates. No wonder he was feared and loathed by reformers and Radicals. Elijah is bound to have known of him, and to have been